The iPod is a wonderful invention and is very useful when you have people round and don't want to go through all the palaver of choosing CDs every hour or so, Just stick the iPod on shuffle and away you go - a supposedly random selection of songs from your own music collection will be played and entertain and astonish your guests.
That's the theory.
When I got my iPod a couple of months ago I decided to waste a few days and put every single album I own on it. This included several CDs from the distant past, plus things that I'd been given or bought and never listened to. Again, in most ways the iPod makes this a very positive experience. You get to hear samplers of albums that you didn't even realise you had and so you can discover hidden gems and new favourites. On the negative side you might discover that the double album of folk music that Stewart Lee gave you a couple of Christmases ago as a kind of joke is turgid and embarrassing. Not too bad if you are on your own, but when you have visitors it can raise a few eyebrows.
And I'm not convinced just how random the shuffle feature is. I have about 300 albums on my iPod at the moment and yet certain ones seem to come up more often than is mathematically probable. Tonight as I played poker with my friends, trying to maintain a cool and intimidating exterior to scare them all away from betting against me (a sort of imaginary ghost costume/projection as worn/projected by one of the villains in Scooby Doo), my cover was continually blown by my appalling taste in music that was continually being spewed into my opponents' ears.
I have one Wurzels LP, which my Somerset friend Brian gave me for my 30th birthday as a kind of ironic joke. We must have had five songs from it during the evening, plus another three or four from the folk album. I have a wide selection of trendy and popular music by current bands such as Franz Ferdinand, The Scissor Sisters and the White Stripes which I pretend to like in the hope that I will impress young women and make myself alluring to them. But my iPod didn't choose to play those. No it would rather play the Alanis Morrisette album I recklesly purchased a few years ago and which I had managed to keep hidden at the back of a cupboard until this revolution in music listening.
The music was so uniformally bad and embarrassing that it transcended pure chance. I have to conclude that like some spooky computer in an overlong and confusing Sci-Fi movie, my iPod has consciousness and musical taste and is deliberately selecting the worst possible tracks available in order to make me look stupid and to prevent me from appearing alluring to young women (thus possibly providing a valuable service to us all).
The gritty battle of wills that is the game of poker was constantly reduced to ridicule and all tension was dissipated by the jolly sound of useless folk music. All mystique was gone. I was amazed that I won a single hand.
And yet you know what they say, unlucky with musical taste, lucky at cards. In spite of my evil music system I had some of the best luck at poker that I have ever encountered (The best when I had a queen in my hand and the flop provided three more queens - sweet) and I won two of the three matches, making literally tens of pounds.
Has anyone else encountered the non-random nature of supposedly random shuffle on their iPod? It's a worrying thought. My guess is that once every home has one of these devices they are going to be able to link up and destroy western civilisation by playing the naffest, most cobweb strewn music we all have. We will all die from shame. And Osama Bin Laden will have won.
A bit like in that Wil Smith film about robots, I imagine. I haven't seen it. But I am sure I've got the gist.
